Culture & Customs

A look at how Soviet propaganda made it onto people's plates.

After a three-year absence, Olympic champion Yevgeny Plyuschenko is staging a comeback.

Boris Kustodiev's "Merchant's Wife at Tea" is the takeoff point for a discourse on revolution, nobility and fine food, in this case Rogaliki - Walnut Crescents.

When it comes to bogeymen, China, Cuba, even North Korea can't hold a candle to old Mother Russia. This week, as tempers flared and theatrical protests abounded around health care, a woman offered this irrational take on proposed reforms at a town hall meeting ...

President Obama gave a nice tribute to Russian culture in his speech to Moscow college students.

While variety may be the spice of life, it is the simplest food that fosters friendship, especially when it is offered from the heart. Columnist Darra Goldstein remembers her time as a guide at a US Exhibit in Moscow and shares a recipe for salted mushrooms.

A guide, with links, to adventure travel in Karelia and beyond.

In our 100th issue, we have a long feature, "100 Things Everyone Should Know About Russia," with loads of factoids, notes, lists and essays. We figured our list of the "must read" fiction and "must see" movies would be a bit contentious (and certainly foreshortened). So we are posting the lists here for reader comment and supplementation...

Sometimes the simplest foods offer the most sublime and satisfying of gustatory experiences.

Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol is one of Russia's greatest and yet least appreciated writers. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, author of Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov and other classics, said that "we all came out of Gogol's Overcoat." What he meant is that Gogol was completely unlike any Russian writer who preceded him, and that all Russian literature that followed was indebted to him.